How to Bulk Delete Album or Track Scrobbles on Last.fm

The solutions in this post cover bulk deleting albums or tracks in general on Tidal, but I’ll use a specific example, outlined below:

Recently I decided to give Tidal a try, which is an online music streaming platform. I signed up and started using a free account to give it a spin. I’ve also been a long-time last.fm user, a service that tracks what you listen to across multiple platforms, so connecting it to my Tidal account was one of the first things I did.

If you came to this page, you might already know this, but the term “scrobble” is what last.fm uses for a recorded play of a song. E.g., if you listen to a song once on Spotify and once on Tidal, but have both accounts connected to last.fm, you would see 2 scrobbles logged.

Unfortunately, I recently noticed that Tidal was “scrobbling” all the advertisements they play when you are using a free account. In fact, it recorded so many Tidal Advertisement (or Advertisement by Tidal) scrobbles that last.fm started saying it was the song I have listened to the most, across all time 😂

“What’s your taste in music?” … “It’s complicated”

Bulk Deleting Last.fm Scrobbles

How to Bulk Delete All Scrobbles of a Given Album in Last.fm

Steps:

1. Navigate to the album page, but via your profile
   • Homepage -> Profile -> Albums -> find the album in the list -> click the three dots to open the extended menu -> Go to Album in Library
   • The final URL should look something like: last.fm/user/{USERNAME}/library/music/{ARTIST}/{ALBUM}
   • For deleting the Tidal Advertisement plays, it should be last.fm/user/{USERNAME}/library/music/Tidal/Advertisement
2. Click the link labeled Delete album From library
3. In the confirmation modal that appears, check the box to confirm that you indeed want to delete all plays from this album, thn click DELETE
4. You should be good to go!

How to Delete All Scrobbles of a Specific Track in Last.fm

Steps:

1. Navigate to the track, but via your profile
   • Homepage -> Profile -> Tracks -> find the track in the list -> click the three dots to open the extended menu menu -> Go to Track in Library
   • The final URL should look something like last.fm/user/{USERNAME}/library/music/{ARTIST}/_/{TRACK}
2. Click the link labeled *Delete track from library
3. In the confirmation modal that appears, check the box to confirm that you indeed want to delete all plays of this track, thn click DELETE
4. You should be good to go!

The Easier Solution for Tidal Advertisement Scrobbles

From a practical perspective, the easiest solution here would be to just upgrade my Tidal account to a paid account 😅

I probably will soon (I’m still evaluating different platforms), but this would still be something that needs to be fixed regardless.

Or, Tidal could fix this on their end. Although I don’t really blame them for not prioritizing a “bug” that only affects free accounts.

The Harder Solution

If you need to delete hundreds of different tracks and/or albums according to some specific logic, you might want to look into scripting a solution with the last.fm API.